The Lie that High-Speed transport can “Spread London’s prosperity to the North”

The main reason for building a new railway route from London to Birmingham is that the London end of the existing route, the WCML ("West Coast Main Line") is full of traffic and that traffic is growing and the WCML soon won't be able to cope. So, build a new line or expand the old one! But another idea was added on. London is the wealthiest town in the country, often called "the powerhouse of the economy" and it is widely (but falsely, see below) believed that wealth spreads out from it. This idea was stated in HS2's report "High Speed Rail" (Cm 7827) and illustrated by Figure 3.2

The idea that quicker connection to London would spread London's wealth northwards was taken up with genuine patriotic enthusiasm and generosity, so hard to fake on live TV, and so the plan was changed to extend the route north of Birmingham. "I want to change the economic geography of this country" said many people in government. Their enthusiasm was fuelled by the prospect of solving a problem which has dogged this country for many years, but it was really grasping at straws. It was helped along by crowd enthusiasm and a degree of London supremacism; a kiss from London is a blessing to any town! I took it seriously myself; I calculated that the pink line represented a slope of £5000/hour's travelling time from London.

But look again at Figure 3.2. It is clear that it is not true in any simple way that wealth falls off with distance from London. The big English cities, the "Core cites" as they define themselves, http://www.corecities.com/ (Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield), have strikingly similar incomes. If it were true that wealth falls off steadily with distance from London, then Birmingham would be wealthier than Manchester which would be wealthier than Newcastle. But they are not. The experiment to test whether shorter journey time to London increases a town’s wealth has already been done and the answer found to be that it doesn’t. Extending this idea to the equivalent cities in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, we get this graph.

​So we see that the wealthier cities are not those nearest London, we see that the English core cities have strikingly similar incomes, no matter what their distance from London, and further away towns like Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow and furthest away, Aberdeen, are doing even better. Indeed at £28 700 Aberdeen is not far behind London at £34 800 and Edinburgh equals London.

But this is only the "Core Cities" What about the rest? The pink line in Figure 3.2 seems to summarise them. But it's not labelled in any way that links it to source data, something we should always be very suspicious of. Plotting the GVA of all areas (including rural) against distance from London we get this:

We see that there are some very wealthy towns just outside London, and maybe their wealth has spread out from London, but there are also some completely average ones. What it most clearly shows is that the pink "trend line" of Figure 3.2 does not represent the truth: The data have been picked to produce the wanted result. It is a lie. I have been lied to. We have all been lied to. It is right to be angry.It is a pity that people of goodwill have been misled by it. It shows the shallowness of the national media that none have done the simple work needed to show up this lie. It is right to be angry that a government agency has misled parliament and the public. Huge sums of money will be spent on something which cannot achieve the hoped-for benefits. And far, far worse, the hopes of a generation will be wasted. Many in the north believe it because it offers hope for themselves, their families and communities. They should rather ask for something effective to be done.

I was saddened to see the way that genuine enthusiasm has been replaced by lip-service as the "leaders" come to see that this plan is not going to do much for the north. But just being sad and angry at a lie is not enough. We have to see that many know it false, but find it more useful to go along with it. At the simplest, many are mentally idle and don't want to challenge accepted belief. They "don't want to rock the boat". This includes Londoners andthose whose minds live in London who like to believe that London is a force for nothing but good. Others want to believe it because they are transport or eco enthusiasts.

Thus, rather in the same way that it came to be believed that Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, which there was never solid grounds for believing, people have come to believe that the planned route will benefit the north.